Online Feature

On the Campaign Trail

A selection of notable articles from past US presidential campaigns, from the Review's archives.

—May 5, 2008

The View from the Heartland
By Joseph Lelyveld
November 4, 2004
Eau Claire, Wisconsin—These are battleground wards, of a battleground district, in a battleground state that's supposedly being scoured by canvassers in pursuit of the few remaining undecided voters. I've landed here, a week before the first presidential debate, on a less frenetic mission. I want to listen, one by one, to a cross-section of Wisconsin voters, hoping to discover what I can about how Iraq is registering, especially among Bush voters, not only as a campaign issue but as a portent of what the country may face in the years ahead.

Party Going
By Lars-Erik Nelson
August 10, 2000
Both apparent nominees, Governor George W. Bush of Texas and Vice President Al Gore, come from the mainstream of their respective parties and both tend toward the center. Bush poses as the "compassionate conservative" and Gore as the "pragmatic liberal." Both descend from political nobility, Bush the son of a former president and Gore the son of a former senator. This is a contest between two elite candidates that might be taking place in some other guise even if we had never had the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.

A Tale of Two Cities
By Garry Wills
October 3, 1996
By the standards of any other society, or of reason itself, the great and growing disparity of wealth in America is a form of successful class warfare waged against the poor and the moderately well-off. But so devoid of a left is this country that even to mention such inequities is branded as "class baiting," and therefore un-American. We have not had an acceptable rhetoric for expressing social discontent against the rich since President Roosevelt's mild, meliorist language about "economic royalists" in the depths of the Depression.

Eye on the Prize
By Joan Didion
September 24, 1992
In the understandably general yearning for "change" in the governing of this country, we might pause to reflect on just what is being changed, and by whom, and for whom. At Madison Square Garden in New York from July 13 until the balloons fell on the evening of July 16, four days devoted to heralding the perfected "centrism" of the Democratic Party, no hint of what had once been that party's nominal constituency was allowed to penetrate prime time, nor was any suggestion of what had once been that party's tacit role, that of assimilating immigration and franchising the economically disenfranchised, or what used to be called "coopting" discontent.

Insider Baseball
By Joan Didion
October 27, 1988
It occurred to me, in California in June and in Atlanta in July and in New Orleans in August, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.

Among the Republicans
By V.S. Naipaul
October 25, 1984
Dallas was air-conditioned—hotels, shops, houses, cars. The convention center was more than air-conditioned; it was positively cool, more than thirty degrees cooler than the temperature outside. Air-conditioned Dallas seemed to me a stupendous achievement, the product of a large vision, American in the best and most humane way: money and applied science creating an elegant city where life had previously been brutish.

The Elections: Why the System Has Failed
By Tom Wicker
August 14, 1980
Presidential politics today, it is reasonably fair to say, is television. Party politics in America has given way to media politics, and the full consequences of that momentous shift probably are yet to be seen; among them, surely, is the loss of function of the traditional parties and the widening gap between the media arts of running for president and the grinding politics of governing the country. But it is not just television that has changed the way we choose presidents almost beyond recognition.

Carter on His Own
By Garry Wills
November 25, 1976
The campaign ended in the normal way, with the candidates heaved grandly about the map in their jets—little bands greeting the big planes in odd places. At the Quad City airport in Illinois, balloons fizzed back along the 727's flanks like champagne bubbles, and the wind threw Carter's voice back at him, his magnified coo of love finding its real target in this process of verbal mirroring.

On the Election
By Elizabeth Hardwick
November 2, 1972
They have all fled—all. The South, Texas, perhaps Massachusetts, New York, California—deserters. The suburbs: feeling ungenerous. The Jews, the unions, a poll slicing off the college professors. The middle class and the working class; the Middle West and the Southwest. Even many of the youth and turncoat Democrats, chagrined party leaders. To persist for McGovern is like staying back in a bombed-out village when everyone else is on the road with his mattress and cooking pots. Are they fleeing toward or away from? Who can say? All we know is the whirr of one-way motion on the bare, yellow, political flatlands.

Notes on the Election
By Mary McCarthy
October 24, 1968
What is new about this election is the number of people who tell you they are not going to vote. People from all walks of life—high corporation executives, SDS youths, my dentist and his technician, a Negro cleaning-woman. The refusal to vote is conceived as a protest, an expression of total disgust, and not just on the part of liberals who, like me, used to vote for Norman Thomas to register disaffection, but on the part of "normal" Republicans and "normal" Democrats: "Count me out this time." Far from being a sign of apathy, it points to an aroused nation, resentful of the insult offered to the intelligence by the Humphrey-Nixon alternative handed to the public like a stacked deck of cards.

A Long View: Goldwater in History
By Richard Hofstadter
October 8, 1964
Early in the campaign Barry Goldwater established a firm image of himself as predictably unpredictable: no one can tell where the audacious veerings and swoopings of his mind will take him, what bizarre new sallies he will launch, what vast intellectual retreats he will find it necessary to undertake without acknowledging that he has budged an inch.